Friday, November 25, 2016

Russian Elite More Anti-American than Russian Population as a Whole, Scholars Say

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 25 – The Russian elite is now significantly more
anti-American and nationalistic than the Russian population as a whole, the
reflection of a paradox: the elites become more nationalistic when tensions
with the West go up, while the masses become more nationalistic when such
tensions ease, according to two Higher School of Economics experts.

In a summary of an article that has
been accepted for publication in “Politeia,” Eduard Ponarin, head of the Higher
Schools laboratory of comparative social research, and Mikhail Komin, a
graduate of its Politics and Administration program, say that this difference
is now affecting the nationality question within Russia (iq.hse.ru/news/197201965.html).

Before the Crimean
Anschluss, they say, Russian elites talked about “the construction of an
ethnically varied society under a special ‘state-forming’ role of the Russian
people.” But now, “the nationality question is being decided differently … in
favor of a nationalism of an ‘imperial’ type with the great ‘Russian’ nation
opposed to the Western world.”

Russian intervention in Ukraine “transformed
the US into the main foreign enemy of Russia” according to polls which show
that “more than 80 percent of the representatives of the elite” now call it
that, compared to only 48.1 percent who were prepared to do so as recently as
2012.

Anti-Americanism among ordinary
Russians rose from 30 percent in 2013 to 65 percent in 2016, an increase but
with figures in both years far below those for the elites, Ponarin and Komin
say.

The reasons for the difference in
such attitudes between the elites and the population as a whole, they suggest,
reflect two things. On the one hand, the elites suffered far more from the
decline in Russia’s prestige after 1991 than did the masses. And on the other,
for the masses, the “significant others” as far as nationalism is concerned are
immigrants; for the elites, who rarely deal directly with that group, the group
they compare themselves to are Western elites.

Those distinctions have meant, the
two investigators say, that “at the mass level, ethnic nationalism has
intensified during periods of the weakening of anti-Americanism,” while “in
periods of the intensification of anti-Americanism at moments of sharp
confrontation between Russia and the West, nationalist attitudes of an ethnic
kind recede.”

The situation with regard to the
elites is just the reverse. When tensions with the West increase, then the
elites become more nationalistic and conversely when tensions with the West are
less, the nationalistic views of the elites decline as well, the two
researchers say.

They note in support of that conclusion
that while “about 60 percent” of members of Russian elites said that “the
national interests” of Russia should be “limited to the current territory of
the country.”But now, “fewer than 18
percent” express that view, a reflection of the very different direction Putin
has taken it in recent times.

This shift has had an impact on how Russians
view the nationality question and the role of the Russian nation in it, the
scholars say.“The contradictory idea of
the construction of ethnically varied society under a special ‘state formation’
role of the Russian people is losing its importance.”

In its place, they are, has arisen
the idea of support for the creation of a large “’rossiisky’ nation” in
opposition to the Western world. Ponarin
and Komin stress that nationalism can be of various kinds, the statist which
can have “an imperial shading” and which organizes people on the basis of a
negative image of a foreign enemy, and the ethnic which in Russia’s case
threatens the territorial integrity of the state.

These two kinds of nationalism, they
point out, “have different sources and different mechanisms of dissemination.”
The selection of one or the other depends on what the elite wants and hopes to
accomplish, and the increasing support for the “’imperial’” variant reflects
three factors in that regard.

First of all, they say, the events
in Ukraine have increased support among the masses for the anti-Americanism of
the elites; second, “the military operation in Syria has permitted the elite to
successfully promote the special role of Russia in the world;” and the role of
the significant ethnic “other” has changed.

In support of that third notion, the
two scholars point to the willingness of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov to “track
down terrorists” not only in his republic but “before its borders.” His
statements in that regard, they say, “weaken anti-Caucasus attitudes and thus
assist the imperial consolidation of the peoples of Russia.”